Hello and welcome back to my blog. Today I would like to talk about having fun with your dialogue. A lot of this would be done in the first draft of your book. In subsequent drafts and revisions you can have even more fun changing how characters respond and clean up repetitive words.

So how to have fun with your dialogue? When you build your characters each one would have a different personality so they don’t all sound the same while talking and in their actions.

For example in my book No Remorse No Regret available here I have a female cop, Jackie Cruze respond to a criminal who claimed no one can touch him, after the guy got killed she says, “Looks like he got touched tonight.”

Her partner, Mitchell Burnlee says, “Still the smart ass you alluded to earlier?”

And her response is, “Better that than a dumb ass for a partner.”

In the sequel there will be a scene where she is questioning a suspect while another suspect is being questioned by Mitchell and she says to the criminal about how he’s going to be grilled. The criminal responds by saying “I’m being coerced, you’re threatening to put me on a barbecue.”

Then she gets a message saying that the one Mitchell is questioning is talking and she tells the one she’s questioning, “We didn’t even have to light up the barbecue.”

Things like that can make a character’s personality shine through, and by extension your personality, and not make dialogue sound so bland.

Make sure, then, to always have fun with every aspect of your writing. Now go out and make it a great day.